Sheffield and Detroit

Analogical reasoning, digital imagining
Author: Kihm, Christophe.; Penwarden, C., tr.
Source: Art Press no260 (Sept. 2000) p. 28-9
ISSN: 0245-5676
 
It is certainly a very modern activity to conceive, realise and fantasise forms of post-utopia (in the community, in exchange and transmission) or post-dystopia (cloning, the disappearance of the subject, the loss of referents), all predicated on technological developments. But to argue that what is happening constitutes a real aesthetico-social revolution is to underestimate both the issue of access to technology (dominated, of course by the elite, even if this domination is relative) and the power of the anthropological rules governing different forms of art and the way in which their representations are communicated and geographically sited.
 
UNDERGROUND The Web society does not mean the end of frontiers between men: rather, it redistributes those frontiers, creates new ones and new forms of exclusion resulting from the impact of the space of flux on physical space. The fact that in this new situation each culture should be seeking to redefine the limits of its space, that it should be providing the “new” with a new “scene,” certainly does not mean that it is pushing back its frontiers.